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Automation is expected to replace millions of Canadian jobs in the future, and for all we know, even political jobs could be carried out by robots.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking; maybe some already are, especially the jobs that require mindless repetition of talking points or applauding on command.

In fact, the robot revolution may have arrived early last weekend, when federal Conservatives chose their new leader at the Toronto Congress Centre. Somehow, a complicated, computerized voting system managed to replicate the excitement of an old-fashioned, delegated convention.

Even though attendees knew that most of the ballots had been cast by mail weeks in advance, scanned into the machine and sorted according to a complex calculation of ranked preferences and proportional points system, it felt like the “multiple ballots” were happening in real time, right there in the hall on Dixon Rd.

“Multiple ballots” is in quotes because individual Conservatives only voted once. What we were seeing were rounds of counting, drawn out for maximum effect.

Political junkies in the room (yes I was among them) were doing hasty arithmetic on which candidates were showing the most growth between counts. Tension was rising with each announcement of results, which emerged over a couple of nail-biting hours.

Maxime Bernier and his supporters began the evening confident in victory and ended it conceding defeat to new leader Andrew Scheer.

While the drama was real, the staged announcements were basically a simulation exercise. Had the Conservatives chosen, they could have pressed a button at the end of the balloting and skipped right to the final result. Yes, the technology would have worked that quickly.

Yet it was interesting to see how much people wanted to believe that these multiple vote counts were a reflection of the mood shifting in the room — fortunes changing on the fly. Media reports talked of “turning points” on Saturday, as though these counts were not the result of ranking decisions made days or even weeks beforehand.

For a little while as we waited for results, I amused myself with the idea that there really was a man behind the curtain, just like the Wizard of Oz. Only in this case, I imagined that Stephen Harper was the guy doing the vote tally, working alone at his desk, as depicted in those old Conservative ads. That would have explained why he wasn’t at the convention to choose his replacement, right?

Of course, neither Harper nor even a robot created that excitement surrounding the Conservative vote count last weekend. It was a very human, old-fashioned public-relations decision to draw out the announcements of the multiple vote counts, and it worked at delivering the drama.

We even got a surprise ending, just like the Oscars, or the U.S. presidential election, for that matter.

But what we also received — and this is the real innovation in political leadership contests — is a huge array of data. By conducting their voting the way they did, Conservatives created a valuable database of supporters.

And the fact that journalists can see this data, and use it, is ushering in some important new ways of reporting on political leadership contests.

The Star’s own Alex Boutillier gave us an early example this week with what he called a “snapshot of the Conservatives’ grassroots.” He found some fascinating demographics: a concentration of social-conservative support in Scarborough and a puzzling lack of law-and-order partisans (given how big those issues used to be.)

Other journalists are combing through the data this week too. Hugo de Grandpré is expected to have a big report in La Presse this weekend and the CBC’s own Eric Grénier revealed on Thursday how 66 people may have changed the destiny of the Conservative leadership race.

Big data isn’t new to Canadian politics — all of the political parties have been getting increasingly adept at using sophisticated voter databases to fight elections. It’s part of my own book, Shopping For Votes, which tracks how Canadian politicos have been using the tricks of the consumer marketplace in their own campaigns for decades now.

What’s worried me is the increasing way in which political parties, armed with this data, know a lot more about the voters than we journalists do. This gap was not as large when politicians and the media were using the same tools — polls — to understand the electorate. Polls, as we’ve seen, are no longer enough. These days, political journalists are going to need to sift through the same kind of data that the parties are analyzing.

So while the robots may not be coming to replace the politicians (not yet,) the Conservatives’ recent leadership race may be giving us some deeper, big-data ways to see politics — with the bonus of (simulated) convention-floor drama.

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